Re: hmm - - - something has changed in perl (from 5.34 to 5.36

I'm getting the same error in 5.26. What works is to use -B4 (i.e. no space).

Why?

$before = shift @ARGV assigns the first element of @ARGV to $before. The first element is -B, regardless of the Perl version. Also, changing the array you're currently iterating over doesn't seem to be a safe operation.

How to fix?

Iterate over the indices rather than elements if you want to peek into surrounding elements.

my $before;
my $arg_index = 0;
while ($arg_index < $#ARGV) {
    my $arg = $ARGV[$arg_index];
    if( $arg =~ /^-B(\d+)$/ ) {  # months Before
        $before = $1;
    } elsif( $arg =~ /^-B$/ ) {
        $before = $ARGV[++$arg_index];
        if( $before !~ /^\d+/ ) {
            die "Bad before argument ($before)\n";
        }
    }
} continue {
    ++$arg_index;
}
[download]

Note that the code doesn't report "Bad before" if there's no space after -B but the value is not a number.

How to fix properly?

Use Getopt::Long.

map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]

Comment on Re: hmm - - - something has changed in perl (from 5.34 to 5.36 Select or Download Code

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Re^2: hmm - - - something has changed in perl (from 5.34 to 5.36
by Tux (Canon) on Nov 24, 2022 at 10:12 UTC

100% agree with this! And Getopt::Long is extremely easy:

use 5.026000;
use warnings;

use Getopt::Long;
GetOptions (
    "B|before=i" => \my $before, # An integer argument is required
    ) or die "User-friendly message\n");
[download]

And if you want -B without any argument to default to say 42, all you have to change is

GetOptions (
    "B|before:42" => \my $before, # An integer argument is optional an
+d defaults to 42 when -B used without arg
    ) or die "User-friendly message\n");
[download]

One step further: set a default, and also give a different default for -B without argument

GetOptions (
    "B|before:42" => \(my $before = 2),
    ) or die "User-friendly message\n");
[download]

In the first two examples $before will have the value undef when the option -B is not given at all. In the last example the default will be 2.

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

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